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IBTA members know that cluster performance software and human troubleshooters monitor InfiniBand port counters for information about traffic on different ports and links. Occasionally the port counters are reset when a network is reconfigured and a fresh view is needed. Similarly, market research vendors monitor manufacturer quarterly earnings announcements to measure the performance of the overall InfiniBand market as well as the switch, HCA and controller segments.

While many tradeshows this year have suffered from declining vendor participation and user attendance, the high-performance computing community was out in full force this week at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’09) in Hamburg, Germany. The IBTA was well represented with several members exhibiting, including: Finisar, Fujitsu Limited, IBM, Intel, LSI, Mellanox , NEC, QLogic, SGI, Sun, Voltaire and W. L. Gore & Associates.

InfiniBand is largely thought of as a high-performance interconnect for large, TOP500-like HPC systems. It certainly is, but InfiniBand’s high bandwidth, low-latency capabilities are also useful across many vertical industries including financial services. A lot of us will be attending ISC’09 in Hamburg, but InfiniBand will also be in the spotlight at the annual Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) show in NYC that’s also taking place next week.

Recently, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) released results from three analyst reports, demonstrating the continued market growth of InfiniBand products in the HPC and data center server and storage markets.

HPC Market Growth

For those following InfiniBand, the March 2009 Tabor Research report, “InfiniBand: Increases in Speed, Usage, Competition,” noting that “60 percent of surveyed HPC systems installed since the start of 2007 use InfiniBand as a system interconnect,” should come as no surprise. What is most promising is that “among those systems, over 30 percent also use InfiniBand for a LAN or storage interconnect.” In my view, that serves as a leading indication that customers are leveraging InfiniBand’s capabilities as the “unified wire”.

The report goes on to highlight increased demand for InfiniBand among customers consolidating their I/O fabrics. “HPC-using organizations that are considering converged fabric strategies are more likely to consolidate on InfiniBand than Ethernet.”

Hello IBTA community - we wanted to provide you with an update on some exciting developments in the world of supercomputing - specifically systems using InfiniBand - from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany.

At the end of May, the JSC reached a significant milestone of German and European supercomputing with the inauguration of two new supercomputers: the supercomputer JuRoPA and the fusion machine HPC FF. And just last week, Sun Microsystems announced the supercomputer JuRoPA2 went online and is the most powerful Sun technology-based computer in Europe.

Recently, Taneja Group published what has become an annual report reviewing the state of InfiniBand in mainstream IT. Once again, the landscape has evolved in interesting ways this year, with virtual infrastructure and cloud computing being several of the forces driving InfiniBand adoption in the enterprise data center. Long story short, InfiniBand has proved itself as a capable platform for continued evolution, and vendors with products in this space have long ago figured out how to make the fabric into a platform. While us bleeding edge technologists speculate about what infrastructure as a service is going to look like, the most common names in InfiniBand have been turning the infrastructure fabric into a service enabled platform. Slightly different twists, as you will soon learn inside the report.